Medical patient monitoring and procedure devices within a Cardiology Laboratory, for example, are typically unable to mutually synchronize data and the devices acquire and process signal data at different sampling rates. For instance, Internal Cardiac Signals and Surface Lead EKG Signals, because of their high frequency components, require sampling rates of 1000 Hz or more whereas respiration signals only require sampling rates of 100 Hz or less as the frequency components of respiration signals are much lower. Invasive Blood Pressure signals employ sampling rates of 200 Hz. The lack of synchronization of medical devices processing these different acquired medical signals reduces reliability and impairs diagnosis of data during cardiac catheter procedures, for example.
In addition, cardiac procedures treat cardiac events with RF energy (ablation), involving burning of cardiac tissue to reroute a conductive path of the heart, for example. In many cardiac events such as Atrial Fibrillation, a user ablates cardiac tissue to normalize patient heart rhythm and synchronizing acquisition and processing of patient parameter signal data with an ablation instrument improves treatment of Atrial Fibrillation, for example. Delay in ablation therapy occurs when the time it takes to realize a cardiac event such as an atrial fibrillation is occurring is too long and the cardiac event goes into remission before ablation therapy can be performed. Further, ablation therapy delay is exacerbated by sampling rate differences between multiple measurement devices, latency within each measurement device and bus issues arising from the use of a single bus linking the medical devices. Also, risk of misdiagnosis based on mis-aligned or mis-synchronized waveforms and signals provided by multiple acquisition devices is increased due to time delay between output of different patient parameter signal data processing devices for presentation in a display and different data sampling rates. A system according to invention principles addresses these deficiencies and related problems.